Anselm Kiefer Seeks to Repair the Heritage Shattered by the Shoah
Modern German art in an Israeli avantgarde museum would have seemed impossible only a few years ago, though there is a connection dating back from a dark past. The Nazis hated both the Jews and “degenerate” modern art. An uncut diamond, an aircraft carrier, or a magic cube à la Rubik. The spectacular addition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, designed by the American architect Preston Scott Cohen and opened last November, evokes a variety of associations. Herta and Paul Amir from Los Angeles sponsored this marvel. Behind a façade consisting of 465 concrete slabs of different shapes and sizes there are three floors, each oriented at a different rotation around the vertical axis and connected by an atrium to the center. They offer 18,500 square meters for the permanent exhibition of Israeli art and special exhibitions, as well as galleries devoted to particular aspects of the collection. Among the latter is the “Gallery of the German Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art”, which is now showing works by German expressionist painters such as Max Beckmann, Ernst Heckel, Ernst L. Kirchner and George Grosz. The exhibition “Utopias on Paper / German Expressionism: Drawings and Prints from the Museum Collection” endeavors to present the multifaceted aspects of this broad descriptor. Its first chapter (November 2011 – January 2012) juxtaposed perceptions of nature and the natural with representations of the metropolis – the scene of action and the bi-polar symbol of modern existence. The second chapter of the exhibition (February – May 2012) will focus on the Expressionists’ ambivalence toward the notion of culture, and the built-in tension between the “authentic” and the cultural. These “Utopias on Paper” are now on display in their own exhibition space – thanks to the commitment of the museum’s German benefactors. The rich collection of German expressionist works in Tel Aviv can be traced back to the art collection of the former director of the first Jewish Museum in Berlin, Karl Schwarz (1885 – 1962). Schwarz brought about 1,500 artworks with him when he emigrated to Palestine and became director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which was founded in 1932. “Shevirat ha-kelim” (Breaking of the Vessels), an exhibition of works by Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), is bridging an entirely different gulf. The German artist has dealt with Jewish mysticism in his work for over 20 years. When his work was first exhibited in Israel in 1986, Kiefer said, “It was like an initiation that deeply influenced my artistic work from that point forward.” In 1990, he received the prestigious “Wolf Prize in Arts” in Jerusalem. “Jews in New York were the first people who understood me,” Kiefer said. Whatever he means by that, his works show how important the concept of Judaism is to him. It is not just a surface onto which he projects ideas, but one that also provides friction.
The title, “Breaking of the Vessels” is an allusion to a foundational concept in Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalist Issak Luria (1534- 1572) used the term to describe a catastrophe that occurred during the creation of the world. His contemporaries had lived through the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, a disaster that demanded explanation. The Kabbalah filled this need by interpreting the apparent randomness and futility of Jewish existence as part of a salvation narrative. In his large format paintings and sculptures, Kiefer deals with the catastrophes of the 20th century, the World Wars and the Shoah. At the exhibit opening, he noted that the connection between Jews and Gentiles in Germany that gave rise to the “wonderful culture in the first third of the 20th century” had been destroyed by the Nazis. Kiefer views the works now on display in the 9,000 square meters of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as his attempt at a “virtual reconciliation.” The exhibition features five new sculptures from the artist’s Women of Antiquity series, five new monumental, mixed-media paintings, three more recent paintings from Kiefer’s own collection, and another two from private collections. It also has three large new woodcuts, each measuring approximately 2 x 3 meters (6.5 x 9.8 feet), a version of the large-scale installation East-West Diwan, and the mentioned new installation, Shevirat Ha-Kelim. The Breaking of the Vessels was specially created by the artist on site. The museum’s former director Mordechai Omer, who passed away recently, called Kiefer “one of the most important present-day artists in the world.” Omer writes that Kiefer “is an artist whose bold confrontation with the myths and history of his homeland, Germany, has been enriched by his deep engagement with the Hebrew Bible and Jewish traditions.” The art is not “degenerate”, but inspiring.